Both women are hoping to get low-income housing funds, and have applied for multiple vouchers, including ones from the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.

“It’s very important,” Martinez said of the help she would receive to pay for housing. “We would literally be homeless, living in a car somewhere. It’s that serious.”

Martinez is lucky. She was just approved for housing through a program at St. John’s shelter.

Ferreira, however, is still waiting.

"I know that I'm number five on Mather,” said Ferreira, of the housing near the airfield. “And (I) just processed my application for Greenway on Monday."

But while people like Ferreira and Martinez wait for housing help, SHRA is in the midst of budget cuts.

Redevelopment money from the state has dried up. Federal sequestration cuts have caused the agency to start monthly furloughs. There is now word that nearly 1,700 low-income housing vouchers could get cut by the agency.

KCRA 3 obtained expense reports for 58 people working at SHRA. The reports are for a January conference that employees attended in Napa.

The total cost for the conference was nearly $24,000.

The agency footed the bill for mileage, hotel rooms, conference costs and meals for nearly all 58 people at the conference, which was held at the Marriott Resort and Spa.

"Our first question would be, how do they even have this kind of money available for these kinds of things?" said Bob Blymyer, of the Sacramento County Taxpayers Association.

Blymyer said sending people to a conference isn’t the main problem, it’s the number of people from SHRA who attended.

“For them to be sending 58 people, and the amount of money we're talking about here, $24,000, that is an insult to the taxpayers that they would spend money like this,” Blymyer said.

SHRA Director LaShelle Dozier would not speak to KCRA 3 on camera. She did send a statement saying the conference was to train staff on HUD regulations.

"While attendance at this training may seem high, this is the only off-site training most employees receive for the year,” Dozier said in the statement.

She added that the agency "pools resources with other housing authorities to reduce training costs, instead of the more expensive alternative, which is to send employees out of state."

Critics of the spending say the agency could have saved taxpayer dollars by sending far fewer employees to the conference and then had those employees train others back at the office.